Humpty Dumpty Circus

Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898)

The Humpty Dumpty Circus is the first animated short film created in stop-motion technique. It features a circus with acrobats and animals in motion.

Date of release
1898-11-02
TMDB
1.5 / 10 (1)
Runtime
4m
Genres
Comedy, Animation
Director
J. Stuart Blackton, Albert E. Smith

Interesting facts

The Humpty Dumpty Circus is a lost short stop-motion trick film directed by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, the Anglo-American founders of Vitagraph Studios. There are no known surviving copies.

Background

Albert E. Smith claimed in his 1952 book Two reels and a crank: "I used my little daughter's set of wooden circus performers and animals, whose movable joints enabled us to place them in balanced positions. It was a tedious process inasmuch as the movement could be achieved only by photographing separately each change of position. I suggested we obtain a patent on the process; Blackton felt it wasn't important enough.

The Moving Picture World. Vol. 3. No. 18 reviewed the short in October 1908: "It opens with a crowd of children leaving school and marching through the streets to the "Humpty Dumpty Circus." We see them crowd into the tent and at the end of each act they vociferously applaud the performers.

The toy set used was most likely the popular Humpty Dumpty Circus produced by Schoenhut Piano Company from 1903 to 1935 (in various styles). Images that have been thought to be stills from the film may well be pictures of the popular toy set.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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